JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

esthetically Two of the recent posts here, “Report from Hollywood” and “Al Mercy,” were taken from a folder of miscellaneous papers that John labeled “Milky Way Productions.” Milky Way published Al Goldstein’s risqué periodical Screw, and the folder does contain a few unfinished ideas for Screw. (Goldstein did publish several humor pieces by John, under the pseudonyms Thorton M. Vaseltarp and Thaddeus T. Farnboggle.) But it also holds three scripts for Mack and Myer for Hire, fragments and ideas for several TV shows (Lost in Space, The Flintstones, The Dick Van Dyke Show), gag letters to something called SNAFU, a 1972 letter about a burglary of his home in Woodstock, a 1971 letter from Loren Coleman, an outline of a book called The Last Great Mysteries, and two résumés from 1965. John’s filing system was as idiosyncratic as the rest of his life.

I posted one of the résumés here. This one may have been a first draft. As usual, it raises a few questions. What, for example, are John’s two hundred film credits? Was The World of the Living Dead ever produced? I can find no trace of it, although it may have been made under another title. John is not listed in the credits of Diary of a Bachelor (you can see them here), but it was produced by Sandy Howard and featured Joey Faye (one of the stars of Mack and Myer) so he was probably called in to provide a few gags. He did write about the technical problems of sound for 8mm film (at least two articles in 1963, for Better Home Movie Making and U. S. Camera); his film The Whimper has survived, and has been digitized. Call My Bluff did air for a few months in 1965, although John is not credited in any of the accounts I’ve seen. I don’t think John ever wrote for Playboy, except for a letter; his proposed article on UFOs was rejected as too long. He did write for the American Forces Network; I’ve listed the scripts he saved in the bibliography on this site. “Hundreds of radio shows,” I’m afraid, is an exaggeration. He did work for Funk & Wagnalls, and is credited as “assistant editor” in the 1960 Book of the Year. I haven’t seen the 1958 edition of Who’s Who in America, but inclusion reportedly involved a fee. The other résumé is a bit more reliable!

Here’s the rest of John’s article “Report from Hollywood,” a melancholy reflection on the unromantic dream factory of 1965. I assume he wrote it for his hometown paper, the Perry Herald, since he mentions Perry several times.

Here’s another curiosity from John’s files: a description of his life in Hollywood, from 1965. Given the references in the introduction, my guess is that it was written for the Perry Herald. A couple of notes: Bed of Nails was the working title for Three Women. Robert Q. Lewis was the host of the TV show Play Your Hunch, which John wrote for back then. Here’s a picture of the two of them. And I’ll post the second part next week.